Amidst Germany’s worsening housing crisis, an influx of new migrants, and rising anti-immigrant sentiment, experts have warned that the German government’s current asylum policies give preferential treatment to Ukrainian refugees over their Afghan counterparts.
For nearly a decade, Germany has taken in by far the most refugees out of all the European nations. In 2015, in the face of Middle Eastern crises that had displaced millions from their home countries, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel adopted asylum policies that led the country to accept the vast majority of the refugees fleeing to Europe. As a result, between 2015 and 2021, Germany granted asylum to 1.24 million refugees, most of whom came from Syria and Afghanistan.
But following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, an influx of nearly one million Ukrainian refugees threatened to overwhelm Germany’s migrant processing system, leaving the government scrambling to find additional housing for the new refugees amidst a nationwide housing shortage.
In some cases, the government chose to prioritize the needs of Ukrainian refugees over Syrian or Afghan refugees. “[Some] Afghans were in hotels for more than a year before [the German government managed to] find them proper housing,” said Abdul Wahid Wafa, the former director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University. “But there was a lot of news about the different kind of welcome by the government [for Ukrainians].”
Indeed, in April 2022, Foreign Policy reported that Berlin’s local government was displacing Afghan refugees from state-provided accommodations to free up room for Ukrainian refugees. “Of course it’s not the Ukrainians’ fault, but we have to reflect on our solidarity if it’s only targeting certain people,” Tareq Alaows, a board member of the Berlin Refugee Council, told Foreign Policy. “The last months showed that different treatment of refugees is possible.”
Since the Russian invasion, Afghan refugees have also voiced frustrations that they are subject to far more restrictive integration policies than their Ukrainian counterparts. Under the European Union’s Temporary Protection Directive, Ukrainians are automatically granted asylum upon arrival in Germany and are eligible to begin working immediately. In contrast, most Afghan refugees are only granted a temporary residence permit while they wait to apply for asylum. “[With only a temporary residence permit,] you don’t have the right to take integration courses, you cannot apply for university courses or degrees, and sometimes you don’t even have a work permit,” said Khusraw Amiri, a staffer in the Afghan consulate of Munich (which still represents the former Afghan republican government, not the Taliban regime).
Of course, there are pragmatic reasons for enforcing different policies for the two groups of refugees, noted Wafa. “Ukrainians are considered short-term migrants who will [return to Ukraine after the war], but for countries in the Middle East, it’s not the case,” he said.
Ukrainian refugees also share more cultural and linguistic ties with their hosts, easing the refugees’ integration into German society. “Ukrainians are from Europe; they are close neighbors, and they are closer in terms of culture and language and their way of clothing,” Wafa added.
But according to Wolfgang Danspeckgruber, a Princeton University professor who studies modern Afghan and European affairs, part of the difference in refugee policies should be directly attributed to racism. “[I know someone] who fell in love with an Afghan refugee,” he said. “After seven years, [the refugee] couldn’t even get a passport, because he’s Afghan and Muslim. That’s it. That’s the story.”
Germany’s flailing economic health could also play a factor in the disparities between Afghan and Ukrainian refugees. “If the economy isn’t doing that well, [attitudes toward migrants] will be even more antagonistic,” Danspeckgruber said. “If you feel that you are in a total crisis mode [at home], you will protect first those who are part of your wider family, which the Ukrainians are — and which all the others outside Europe are not.”
Indeed, Danspeckgruber warned that far-right political parties are using Germany’s economic situation to stoke increasingly nativist views toward migrants from the Middle East, which will exacerbate policy differences. “[People are now] super conscientious of the ‘them versus us’ [narrative],” he said. “The ‘them’ are the Islamists, meaning the Afghans and other non-Judeo-Christian migrants in Europe.”
Current attitudes and unequal treatment aside, however, Wafa argued Germany still bears a high degree of moral responsibility for Afghan refugees at the end of the day. “[European] countries went [to Afghanistan] for 20 years; they had forces there, soldiers were there, and they had a lot of projects,” he said. “There is a lot of obligation as human beings and as part of a member of nations around the world to keep these migrants.”
